Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Marie Claire.
“He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take
him off it. I held him in my arms when he died. Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about
Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he
regarded as ‘emotionally manipulative.’ I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by
making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again
as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets.” Later, Justine
chalked up Musk’s reaction to a defense mechanism that he’d learned from years of suffering as a kid. “He
doesn’t do well in dark places,” she told 
Esquire
magazine. “He’s forward-moving, and I think it’s a

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survival thing with him.”
Musk did open up to a couple of close friends and expressed the depth of his misery. But for the most
part, Justine read her husband right. He didn’t see the value in grieving publicly. “It made me extremely
sad to talk about it,” Musk said. “I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no
good for the future. If you’ve got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for
anyone around you. I’m not sure what should be done in such situations.”
Following Nevada’s death, Musk threw himself at SpaceX and rapidly expanded the company’s goals.
His conversations with aerospace contractors around possible work for SpaceX left Musk disenchanted.
It sounded like they all charged a lot of money and worked slowly. The plan to integrate components made
by these types of companies gave way to the decision to make as much as practical right at SpaceX.
“While drawing upon the ideas of many prior launch vehicle programs from Apollo to the X-34/Fastrac,
SpaceX is privately developing the entire Falcon rocket from the ground up, including both engines, the
turbo-pump, the cryogenic tank structure and the guidance system,” the company announced on its website.
“A ground up internal development increases difficulty and the required investment, but no other path will
achieve the needed improvement in the cost of access to space.”
The SpaceX executives Musk hired were an all-star crew. Mueller set to work right away building the
two engines—Merlin and Kestrel, named after two types of falcons. Chris Thompson, a onetime marine
who had managed the production of the Delta and Titan rockets at Boeing, joined as the vice president of
operations. Tim Buzza also came from Boeing, where he’d earned a reputation as one of the world’s
leading rocket testers. Steve Johnson, who had worked at JPL and at two commercial space companies,
was tapped as the senior mechanical engineer. The aerospace engineer Hans Koenigsmann came on to
develop the avionics, guidance, and control systems. Musk also recruited Gwynne Shotwell, an aerospace
veteran who started as SpaceX’s first salesperson and rose in the years that followed to be president and
Musk’s right-hand woman.
These early days also marked the arrival of Mary Beth Brown, a now-legendary character in the lore
of both SpaceX and Tesla. Brown—or MB, as everyone called her—became Musk’s loyal assistant,
establishing a real-life version of the relationship between 
Iron Man
’s Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. If
Musk worked a twenty-hour day, so too did Brown. Over the years, she brought Musk meals, set up his
business appointments, arranged time with his children, picked out his clothes, dealt with press requests,
and when necessary yanked Musk out of meetings to keep him on schedule. She would emerge as the only
bridge between Musk and all of his interests and was an invaluable asset to the companies’ employees.
Brown played a key role in developing SpaceX’s early culture. She paid attention to small details like
the office’s red spaceship trash cans and helped balance the vibe around the office. When it came to
matters related directly to Musk, Brown put on her firm countenance and no-nonsense attitude. The rest of
the time she usually had a warm, broad smile and a disarming charm. “It was always, ‘Oh, dear. How are
you, dear?’” recalled a SpaceX technician. Brown collected the weird e-mails that arrived for Musk and
sent them out as “Kook of the Week” missives to make people laugh. One of the better entries included a
pencil sketch of a lunar spacecraft that had a red spot on the page. The person who sent in the letter had
circled the spot on his own drawing and then written “What is that? Blood?” next to it. In other letters
there were plans for a perpetual motion machine and a proposal for a giant inflatable rabbit that could be
used to plug oil spills. For a short time, Brown’s duties extended to managing SpaceX’s books and
handling the flow of business in Musk’s absence. “She pretty much called the shots,” the technician said.
“She would say, ‘This is what Elon would want.’”
Her greatest gift, though, may have been reading Musk’s moods. At both SpaceX and Tesla, Brown
placed her desk a few feet in front of Musk’s, so that people had to pass her before having a meeting with

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him. If someone needed to request permission to buy a big-ticket item, they would stop for a moment in
front of Brown and wait for a nod to go see Musk or the shake-off to go away because Musk was having a
bad day. This system of nods and shakes became particularly important during periods of romantic strife
for Musk, when his nerves were on edge more than usual.
The rank-and-file engineers at SpaceX tended to be young, male overachievers. Musk would
personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had
finished with the best marks on their exams. It was not unusual for him to call the students in their dorm
rooms and recruit them over the phone. “I thought it was a prank call,” said Michael Colonno, who heard
from Musk while attending Stanford. “I did not believe for a minute that he had a rocket company.” Once
the students looked Musk up on the Internet, selling them on SpaceX was easy. For the first time in years if
not decades, young aeronautics whizzes who pined to explore space had a really exciting company to
latch on to and a path toward designing a rocket or even becoming an astronaut that did not require them
to join a bureaucratic government contractor. As word of SpaceX’s ambitions spread, top engineers from
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences with a high tolerance for risk fled to the upstart, too.
Throughout the first year at SpaceX, one or two new employees joined almost every week. Kevin
Brogan was employee No. 23 and came from TRW, where he’d been used to various internal policies
blocking him from doing work. “I called it the country club,” he said. “Nobody did anything.” Brogan
started at SpaceX the day after his interview and was told to go hunting in the office for a computer to use.
“It was go to Fry’s and get whatever you need and go to Staples and get a chair,” Brogan said. He
immediately felt in over his head and would work for twelve hours, drive home, sleep for ten hours, and
then head right back to the factory. “I was exhausted and out of shape mentally,” he said. “But soon I loved
it and got totally hooked.”
One of the first projects SpaceX decided to tackle was the construction of a gas generator, a machine
not unlike a small rocket engine that produces hot gas. Mueller, Buzza, and a couple of young engineers
assembled the generator in Los Angeles and then packed it into the back of a pickup truck and drove it out
to Mojave, California, to test it. A desert town about one hundred miles from Los Angeles, Mojave had
become a hub for aerospace companies like Scaled Composites and XCOR. A lot of the aerospace
projects were based out of the Mojave airport, where companies had their workshops and sent up all
manner of cutting-edge airplanes and rockets. The SpaceX team fit right into this environment and
borrowed a test stand from XCOR that was just about the perfect size to hold the gas generator. The first
ignition run took place at 11 
A.M
. and lasted ninety seconds. The gas generator worked, but it had let out a
billowing black smoke cloud that on this windless day parked right over the airport tower. The airport
manager came down to the test area and lit into Mueller and Buzza. The airport official and some of the
guys from XCOR who had been helping out urged the SpaceX engineers to take it easy and wait until the
next day to run another test. Instead, Buzza a strong leader ready to put SpaceX’s relentless ethos into
play, coordinated a couple of trucks to pick up more fuel, talked the airport manager down, and got the
test stand ready for another fire. In the days that followed, SpaceX’s engineers perfected a routine that let
them do multiple tests a day—an unheard-of practice at the airport—and had the gas generator tuned to
their liking after two weeks of work.
They made a few more trips to Mojave and some other spots, including a test stand at Edwards Air
Force Base and another in Mississippi. While on this countrywide rocketry tour, the SpaceX engineers
came across a three-hundred-acre test site in McGregor, Texas, a small city near the center of the state.
They really liked this spot, and talked Musk into buying it. The navy had tested rockets on the land years
before and so too had Andrew Beal before his aerospace company collapsed. “After Beal saw it was
going to cost him $300 million to develop a rocket capable of sending sizeable satellites into orbit, he

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called it quits, leaving behind a lot of useful infrastructure for SpaceX, including a three-story concrete
tripod with legs as big around as redwood tree trunks,” wrote journalist Michael Belfiore in